For your listening pleasure: one hour, seven minutes of the pirate radio station, Radio Free Whatever.

I recorded this broadcast on December 15 2013, starting around 2:40 UTC, on 6,925 kHz AM. This broadcast was a tribute to WWII and Pearl Harbor and contains news clips and music from the same time period. I believe my recording begins about five or so minutes into their broadcast.

Many thanks to SRAA contributor Adam C. Smith who shares the following recording of pirate radio station, Purple Nucleus Of Creation. This recording was made on October 27, 2001 at 00:09UTCon 6,928 USB:

Last night at about 00:10 UTC, I was pleased to hear the interval signal of one of my favorite pirate radio stations: Radio Casablanca.

“Rick Blaine” fired up his AM transmitter and pumped out some amazing WWII era music on 6,940 kHz for about one hour and a half. Radio Casablanca only pops up a few times a year, so I always feel fortunate to grab the broadcast (click here to listen to previous recordings).

Signal strength varied over the course of the broadcast and the bands were quite noisy–still, the Casablanca signal punched through quite well at times.

Close your eyes and imagine what it must have been like to hear the great bands of the era over the shortwaves…

Click here to download an MP3 of the full recording, or simply listen via the embedded player below. Note that the interval signal starts around 01:25:

Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Colin Newell, who shares two recordings from the late 1970s of the pirate radio station RX4M The Voice of Clipperton.

Colin recorded both of these station IDs from British Columbia, Canada, using his cassette recorder. Colin also notes that he may be the only person to have ever recorded RX4M off-air. RX4M was inducted into the North American Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame in 2011. The following is an excerpt from an article written by Andrew Yoder on the NA Pirate Radio Hall of Fame site :

RX4M (Radio Experiment on 40 Meters) put in more time and hours to overcome obscurity, only to quickly fall back into obscurity, thanks to a pirate-unfriendly location in Washington State. Even by the mid-‘80s, few DXers or pirate listeners had heard RX4M, and few remembered it.

The first difficulty for RX4M to overcome was the poor communications of the late ‘70s. When the station began broadcasting in August 1979, there was no Internet and all DX news either was discovered via monthly bulletin or magazine, meaning a minimum delay of two months for information to be reported.

The next problem was the Pacific Northwest. At the time, very few shortwave DXers and almost no pirate listeners were located in the region. Some young pirate listeners were networking in southern California, toward Los Angeles, but even that was a long haul from the Seattle area.

Despite a nightly broadcast schedule and boasting two transmitters (20 and 100 watts), no DXers in either NASWA or the Newark News Radio Club (two of the largest shortwave clubs of the time, and two of the best for pirate news) reported RX4M until April 1980 on 7370 kHz.

The few listeners who remember RX4M know it as possibly the only North American pirate to operate with a regular shortwave station, like a licensed outlet. It was on nightly from *0550-0630* UTC with a variety of programs produced by different station staff: News with Tony Giles, Post Office Box 80 with Aaron Richardson, DX Forum with Mickey Anderson, Let’s Talk Technical with Larry Adams, and the Good Morning Show with Jerry Nelson. Other time slots were filled with old-time radio programs, such as Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee & Molly, Sherlock Holmes, Fred Harris & Alice Faye.

[...]RX4M, the Voice of Cliperton, was never heard again and no shortwave pirate since has adopted its style. At a time when many DXers were bitterly anti-pirate, many reporters said that RX4M programming sounded very professional.

Pirate radio broadcaster Radio XFM on 6.975 MHz on Halloween Night, 2015, 0040 to 0317 UTC (Nov 1st, UTC) as received in Stockbridge, Georgia. The equipment used was an Icom IC-7200 transceiver using a 60 foot end-fed horizontal antenna. For the first minute of the recording I was switching back and forth between the horizontal antenna and a 25 foot vertical antenna, and trying out different audio bandwidths to improve reception. I finally settled on the end-fed and a 8000kz bandwidth. Conditions were interesting, with some fading and static from time to time.

At 21:12 into the recording he talks about my emailed reception report, so that was cool. Total time for this recording is 2 hours, 36 minutes, and 40 seconds (156:40).

Live hour-long recording of the "last" Radio Spaceshuttle International broadcast on 20 September 2015 beginning at 19:00 UTC on a frequency of 13600 kHz. The broadcast was from the Kostinbrod (near Sofia), Bulgaria, transmitter site. The transmitter power announced during the broadcast was 100 kW. This is consistent with the HFCC (High Frequency Coordination Conference) registration of the 13600 kHz frequency by Spaceline, Ltd., the airtime broker for shortwave transmissions from Kostinbrod, between 10:00 and 20:00 UTC. The registered antenna beam direction is 195 degrees.

Reception was poor to fair with some interference from Radio Martí on 13605 kHz and the Cuban jammer aimed at it. The broadcast, compered by "Dick Spacewalker" and originating in Finland, consisted of pop music and acknowledgements of listeners' reports. The language used is mostly English with some Finnish and Japanese announcements. The broadcast begins anomalously at 19:00:11 UTC with a sign-on announcement from the Overcomer Ministry (also a user of the Kostinbrod facility) and a wrong announced frequency. The Radio Spaceshuttle International program begins about 1m:20s later.

The broadcast was received on a Tecsun PL-880 receiver with a Tecsun AN-03L 7-metre wire antenna outdoors in Hanwell (just outside Fredericton), New Brunswick, Canada, in AM mode with 3.5 kHz RF filtering.

SRAA contributor, Jim Clary (ND9M/VQ9JC), recorded the following final broadcast of Radio Spaceshuttle International while on board a US Navy ship off the coast of Spain. Jim notes:

I was packing up to leave my ship and return to the USA this week when the latest SWLing Post e-mail showed up with info about SSR's final broadcast literally seven minutes before he was to come on the air. I'd already broken down the receiving gear, but it came back together in record time, and I was able to get the recorder going with a minute before the transmission started.

SSR's signal was a solid S9, which wasn't all that surprising since he's only a few hundred miles from here.

For your listening pleasure: one hour, eleven minutes of the pirate radio station, Generation Wild 100.

Generation Wild 100 started broadcasting around 2:00 UTC this morning on 6,925 kHz in the upper sideband. As you’ll hear in the recording, their signal here in eastern North America was verystrong, even drowning out most of the ever-present summer static crashes.

I had never heard Generation Wild 100 before; this was a new pirate logging for me. After hearing their intro, I expected they’d play trance, techno, or punk rock…Not so. GW100 played a mix of, um,lounge music. I chuckled to hear their high-energy bumpers segue into smooth jazz.

Proves yet again that with pirates, you’ll never know what to expect. I love it!

For your listening pleasure: European pirate radio station, Bogusman Radio.

This recording was submitted by UK-based SRAA contributor, London Shortwave who writes:

"[This is] something I caught on my Lowe HF-150 on May 26 while scanning the 49 meter band. It sounds like a local pirate radio station and it appears that the program was pre-recorded and then left on repeat for that evening (speech and music).

My recording starts at 20:05 UTC on the frequency of 6,305 kHz. I used DX Engineering's NCC-1 Phaser and two Wellbrook antennas to cope with local QRM."

Tip and Elvis was broadcasting on 6,220 kHz in AM–you’ll hear some adjacent digital interference, but signal strength is pretty good for (most likely low power) pirate radio. This recording starts around 20:30 GMT on May 31, 2014.

Wolverine was broadcasting on 6,950 kHz in the upper side band. Typical of Wolverine, lots of music variety which spans the decades and no commentary other than station ID throughout.

At the end of this recording, you'll hear an SSTV QSL card being transmitted.

Try decoding the QSL image from this recording--it's quite easy! I usually decode Wolverine’s SSTV QSL with Chris Smolinski’s SSTV app for iPhone, but there are other programs to do this. The eQSL above came from a broadcast about two weeks ago and was submitted by SWLing Post reader, Steve Yoth.

Hot Legs was rather weak and somewhat over-modulated. Indeed, in regular AM mode, I couldn't make out the station ID at all. Fortunately, by turning on the WinRadio Excalibur‘s AM synchronous detector and selecting the less noisy lower sideband, I dug the signal out of the noise. AM sync also helped compensate for the over-modulation.

You’ll hear me re-tune a couple of times in this recording. Hot Legs' signal was a bit of a moving target. I don’t think it would have been as noticeable in standard AM mode (which is more forgiving of drift), but in AM sync, you’ll hear a tone when the frequency shifts.

Still, I’m quite happy to have caught Hot Legs Radio–a new pirate logging! Hope to hear them on again soon.

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